Originally Posted by SteveBartylla 

Since the management portion of this thread seems to have ran it’s course, I’ll derail it myself with one last thought. Willie’s situation brings up an important point. Rarely is any property, stand site, food sources and so on all naturally setup perfectly.

Luckily, one rarely has to live with the situation. Though to some extend, this applies to every hunter, the majority on here have a tremendous advantage over those that don’t own or full control ground. Virtually every problem we have, whether it’s high impact stand access, horribly located food sources, deer bedding in less than ideal locations, neighbors killing all our young deer or virtually any other issue, there are almost always steps we can take that can at least help, if not completely solve the situation.

In most cases, all it takes is identifying the problem, analyzing the situation and coming up with creative solutions. Sure, sometimes the solutions are cost and/or time prohibitive. As much as I’d often love high fencing one side of a property to cutoff a less than helpful neighbor, that isn’t happening. If the property owner I’m consulting for buys into it/sees it as the problem I do, I may be able to create a 30-50ish yard wide hinge cut blockade.

Is that extreme or right for every situation? No, but the point is that the more one analyzes a situation and opens their mind to creative solutions, odds are they can come up with something. So, high fence is out and so is a hinge cut blockade, but maybe I can make a few more improvements to my property to increase its holding power, while making that property line my main access route.

By further increasing the quality of my habitat and using that property line for access and departure as much as practically possible (educating deer to human activity there, while minimizing human activities where I want them to be) I won’t completely stop deer from jumping the fence. I can reduce it a bit more, though…and enough “little bits” can add up to something, particularly when most of us would often be happy with just getting one more year on one more buck.

That’s just a cheesy example. The point is that we can almost always make every problem at least less problematic, if not completely solved. Our mind, the power to analyze and come up with creative solutions is our best weapon. It’s rare that one can’t at least further improve an otherwise bad situation.